Holocaust survivor to be reunited with rescuers’ family
Published: November 23, 2005
Before the Nazi era, Zalucka’s parents, the Szczygiels, were long-time customers of the sweet shop run by Gruener’s parents, Barbara and Isaac Gamzer. Zalucka’s mother, Irena, took a shine to the Jewish proprietors’ daughter, who was called Luncia and changed her name to Ruth only after moving to the United States in 1949.
As Gruener tells it, the Szczygiels took a grave risk by sheltering her, punishable by death. She arrived at the house the day after her father snuck her past murderous guards and out of the Jewish ghetto under his overcoat late in 1941.
She said she cried for weeks, confined to the darkest corner of the three Szczygiel sisters’ room so she wouldn’t be detected by neighbors. She spent nights under a bed as Zalucka slept, stifling her moans, conversations with imaginery friends and her wimpering with a handkerchief wet from tears. Through it all, Zalucka bathed her guest, combed her hair and taught her to read and write.
But it became too heavy a secret for the Szczygiel family to bear.
Unable to move around for the months in hiding, Gruener said she had to learn again to walk before Irena Szczygiel, frightened by several close calls, escorted her by streetcar to the home where her parents were hidden by another Christian family.
The Gamzers rode out the occupation together, avoiding the fate of scores of their relatives killed by the Germans. Eventually the family moved to the United States and opened a candy shop at Avenue U and East 23rd Street in Brooklyn. [Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas]
Gruener and her husband, Jack, whom she met later in New York, started an interior decorating business, raised two sons and have four grandchildren.
“The world is so beautiful, and I’d so much like to live,” Gruener remembers blurting out upon seeing her father, and the outdoors, for the first time after she went into hiding with the Szczygiels for eight months.
To that her father replied: “You will, kitten, you will.”
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